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The DSM-G600 Rev-A suffers from a particularly weak implementation of the
Redboot bootloader. In particular, it has no support
at all for the network chip, and thus there is no network access to the device until
the device has booted.

On the positive side, the implementation of Redboot does have the ability (unlike
the NSLU2) to pass command-line arguments to the operating system that it boots.
This feature means that there's no real reason to run the second-stage bootloader
(APEX) on the dsmg600 -- there's no features to be gained by doing so. But just
because fate has a sense of humor, the dsmg600's flash memory is allocated in such
a fashion that is has unallocated space, that fits APEX and the APEX environment
perfectly. Perhaps a future release of APEX will support the built-in IDE controller
(making booting direct from the internal disk possible), or (very unlikely) perhaps
even offer network support for the built-in NIC. Until then, there's no reason
to use APEX if one doesn't wish to use it.

Refer to the standard Redboot documentation. An on-line copy can be found
here.

Below is the output from the bootloader at power-up, and the fis listing. Note
that the fis directory from the system below has the empty space referred to
above defined as the "loader" partition. That line will be missing on stock
DSM-G600 units.